“You got out of line, you got whacked”: slang in Hollywood mafia movies and Italian dubbing

The characters starring mafia movies in Hollywood productions usually speak a very distinguishable language variety which is connoted at various levels. The most characterizing of all the elements that contribute to making it so peculiar is no doubt its very specific slang. It is a fact that the use of some specific words and expressions which can be classified as slang play an indubitable role in their characterization. As Gramley (2001:207) claims: ‘Slang is, first and foremost, group language’, and it is mainly thanks to the presence of slang that the audience can identify the characters as belonging to the group of mobsters from a linguistic perspective. Indeed, in the dialogues of mafia movies it is possible to single out a series of slang terms which characterize the characters not only from a social, but also from an ethnic perspective. The slang they use, in fact, is often specific not only to the social group of gangsters, but also to the Italian ethnic group. Therefore, slang plays an extremely important role. It goes without saying that this element should ideally be transposed in a target language with corresponding terms and expressions which allow the spectators to catch all the connotations conveyed by its use in the original versions. The analysis of the Italian dubbed versions of five mafia movies released between the years 1990 and 1997 has revealed that in the case of some films the translation can be considered successful, as it manages to transpose both the diatopic and the diastratic connotations of the source texts, while in other films many of the slang expressions have been generalized or standardized, therefore implying a substantial loss in characterization.